Over just the last few weeks, three unarmed African-American men have been killed by police. After the Michael Brown was gunned down in Ferguson, Missouri, President Obama urged all Americans to "remember this young man through reflection and understanding" and to "comfort each other and talk with one another in a way that heals, not […]

Watching Rick Perry 2.0 get Biblical on his audience this weekend in Iowa has some conservatives seeing starbursts again. "Dressed all in black, Governor Rick Perry took the podium at the Family Leadership Summit and quoted the book of Isaiah," Breitbart News gushed. "Here am I, send me!" he said. Now, if this riff sounds […]

When the forces of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) overran Mosul and Tikrit two months ago, I laid out 10 Lessons from Bush's Fiasco in Iraq. But like Spinal Tap, I should have gone to 11. I forgot to include one additional moral from Mesopotamia: John McCain got it all horribly wrong. […]

Politico practices journalism in much the same way that bricks float.* For years, its mission to "win the morning" has often come at the expense of the truth. But with Katie Glueck's piece on Iraq titled "Neocons to Obama: No Half-Measures," the publication Charles Pierce rightly mocks as "Tiger Beat on the Potomac" has reached […]

Conservatives have a new sound bite. On behalf of all Americans, they are offended by the sound of President Obama's sound bites. (At times, I am too. After all, if "we tortured some folks," then we have a legal and moral responsibility to prosecute some folks.) Rich Lowry, taking a break from seeing starbursts from […]

Better late than never, the New York Times this week announced it would finally use the term "torture" to refer to the set of Bush administration practices euphemistically referred to as "enhanced interrogation techniques." But in ending one disservice to its readers, Times executive editor Dean Baquet performed another. By now proclaiming "the debate is […]

Michael Oren, the former Israeli ambassador to the United States, is a fixture on American television screens and op-ed pages. His defense of the Netanyahu government and its military campaign in Gaza is full throated. Just 8 days after proclaiming in the Washington Post that "to guarantee peace, this war must be given a chance," […]

Republicans hoping to win over Jewish voters apparently believe that Israel's war in Gaza is, well, a godsend. Pointing to polling that shows that Democrats (31 percent) are less likely than Republicans (65 percent) to see the carnage in Gaza as justified, GOP advocates like former Bush administration official Noam Neusner claim "that is going […]

With their 225 votes to sue President Obama, House Republicans provided one of the most ironic spectacles in recent U.S. political history. After waves of op-eds by Speaker John Boehner (here and here) and his legal puppet master David Rivkin (here and here) declared Obama guilty of almost every sin in the calendar, the House […]

Five years ago, I described Dick Cheney's strident defense of detainee torture as a strategy of "mutual assured destruction." The former Vice President's gambit was a simple one. In 2009, Cheney dared President Obama to either prosecute him and other Bush administration officials over their program of "enhanced interrogation techniques" (in which case massive Republican […]